Curly is getting ready to go to work by injecting heroin and then cocaine into his hand.
The 46-year-old’s day starts with a visit to the Copenhagen’s mobile safe injection van where he shoots up under the supervision of qualified nurses.
“I use cocaine mostly and heroin sometimes but I get my methadone from a place so I don’t have to be a criminal to get drugs,” he says as he holds a lighter to a small container of heroin to heat it up before injecting.
“I’m using drugs since I was 20.”
But it costs money to support a drug habit like Curly's and in Denmark it seems, there is honour amongst junkies. That’s why Curly works to pay for every fix.
Curly is one of 60 vendors selling a Big Issue-style street magazine, whose profits are directly designed to fund their drug habit.
In that same way that Copenhagen’s safe injection facilities are treating the drug problem with harm minimization Illegal magazine is treating the city’s drug problem with economic rationalism.
Illegal Magazine founder, social entrepreneur Michael Lodberg Olsen, says it reduces drug-related crime by giving users an alternate revenue model.
"People have been criticising it," he says. "They think that the drug users will take more drugs selling the magazine."
"Instead of crime and prostitution they can sell the magazine on the street."
Copenhagen has about 8000 drug addicts and like Curly, 74 per cent are male and 67 per cent are aged between 31 and 50.
The former meatpacking district of Vesterbro is where up to 800 people linked to drugs come here everyday.
Since Vesterbro’s safe injecting room opened last October, there’s been more than 36,000 injections by about 1000 addicts, getting through about 350 syringes a day.
Mr Olsen that for every 20 kroner ($4 AUD) that sellers earn from selling one copy of Illegal, there’s a social value of 200 kroner ($40 AUD).
"It's been the same treadmill for like 40 years," he says. "We have to try to deal with this problem in a new way."
He says he plans to double the print run next month and is looking to extend the magazines presence in London and Berlin.
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